With the advancement of computers, digital holography has become an area of interest and has gained some popularity. Conventionally, a Fresnel hologram of a three-dimensional scene can be generated numerically by computing the fringe patterns emerged from each object point to the hologram plane. Research findings derived from digital holography technology have demonstrated the possibility for generating holograms (e.g., medium-sized holograms) for representing three-dimensional (3-D) scenes that can contain a relatively large number of object points. Some techniques have been able to generate and process digital holograms at video rates with the use of the wavefront recording plane.
While these results are encouraging, they are shrouded by the lack of high-resolution real-time spatial light modulators (SLMs) (e.g., SLMs of 5 microns or less) for displaying the digital holograms. Although higher resolution holographic displays can be implemented with the integration of an active tiling method and optically addressed SLMs (OASLMs), the cost of such systems can be expensive, and implementation of such systems also can be complex.
The above-described description is merely intended to provide a contextual overview of generating and displaying digital holograms, and is not intended to be exhaustive.